Paul Elam, head ranter at A Voice for Men, has a new video out called “You want privilege? You got it!” The thesis: if women really did have the so-called privileges that men have, they’d hate it and want men to take them all back. Because all of these so-called privileges are really giant burdens. Or, as Elam puts it, somewhat more melodramatically, these privileges have “begun to more resemble an anchor around your neck than the helm of a great ship that everyone tells you that you are captaining.”
Here’s the video.
Well, all right, that’s not really Paul Elam. But that little clip does capture pretty well the tone of his latest post, which is indeed about how male privilege is really a terrible burden.
I mean, this is his opener:
I swear by everything holy that the next time I hear some fembot caterwaul about “male privilege,” I am going to find something to break, turn it into shards, and drag the broken pieces across my chest just to distract me from the pain of their increasing stupidity. Just picture me like Martin Sheen, collapsed in a heap of bloody, tearful insanity on the floor of a cheap hotel in Saigon.
Heck, compared to that, Mr. McDuck’s reaction to the news about his “ice cream” was, if anything, rather restrained.
The rest of Elam’s post is, as is typical for him, a rather trite recitation of a number of standard Men’s Rights talking points about male “disposability” written in some of the most ridiculously overblown prose ever seen outside of an Ayn Rand novel.
Elam complains that he hasn’t seen much benefit from his privileges:
Mind you I still don’t know what that privilege is. One time when I was young and very poor I was late on my light bill. I showed the electric company my balls, but they cut my power off anyway. …
Yeah, as someone who’s also had his power cut off, I’m pretty sure they do that with everyone. I’m also pretty sure that no feminist has ever or will ever argue that male privilege means you won’t get your power cut off for nonpayment.
Here’s Elam addressing women as if they’ve traded place with men:
With your privilege comes the right to work on crab boats, drive trucks, work on electric lines, walk into burning buildings and sink into the bowels of the earth digging out coal and other things people find useful.
Apparently having greater occupational choices is scary and bad.
When a ship goes down, or any other life threatening disaster strikes, you have two choices. Be a real woman and die, or treat your life like it has value and have the world shit on you as a coward who refused to perish on cue. There is also the possibility of third option, either die from the disaster so that men can live, or have another woman blow a fucking hole in your face with a pistol because you tried to save yourself.
Yeah, I believe we may have addressed this earlier. Oh, but there’s more:
Like noticing the emperor has no clothes, it may hit you one day when you decide not to offer your seat to a man; when the stares at you from all around seem to come down people’s noses. …
You must learn not to say a word. Not to anyone else, not even to yourself. You must learn to see flames, coal dust, icy saltwater, death and sacrifice for the trappings of power that the world around you thinks them to be.
Says a dude typing out his manifestos on an expensive laptop he conned nagged his followers into buying for him.
And you must be willing to hang your head in shame over that power, even as the world chews you up, spits you out, and gets ready to take its turn with your daughter.
Elam’s rousing conclusion:
So, that is it, ladies. You want my privilege, it is yours. I will gladly hand it over to you this very minute. I am just waiting for you to meet the pre-requisites of disposibilty and an utter lack of self-value. I am waiting for you to woman up to the job, take off your fucking make up and be ready to bleed, blah blah blah look at me I’m mad!
I paraphrased a little at the end there. But, yes, the world champion at seeing male “disposability” everywhere did in fact misspell the word “disposability.” That was all him. And so, believe it or not, is the following:
I, like a Jew gone weary of being called a chosen one, am completely ready for anyone else, and in particular, you, to be chosen.
Personally, I have had about all the privilege I can stand.
Yep. He went there.
Also, I don’t know if you all knew this, but when women serve in the military these days it’s “like a day care camp for them.”
Also, not to pat myself on the back or anything, but my headline is much better than his. Maybe he should get me to write all the headlines on A Voice for Angry Duck Plutocrats Men.
Discuss.
Hellkell has a good point that if you wanted to know you can find out so much more info by doing your own research instead of asking random people on the internet.
and speaking of your lack of understanding:
Well you may not be privileged in that respect but you are in other respects I hope you know. As a dude at the very least (and if you are white and straight you also have privilege in that respect).
*and if you wanted
jumbofish “Well you may not be privileged in that respect but you are in other respects I hope you know.”
In some respects sure. I think i’m privileged for example that I can walk where as some people are physically handicaped or that I can eat every night and in some places there are people starving to death.
Maybe in some respects i have privilege for being male. I probably don’t have to worry about being raped or sexually assaulted like women do and i’ll admit to that. There’s the pay gap but I don’t even have a job so… lol. It’s just hard for me to feel like the average woman has it harder than me when you weigh everything together, maybe a woman who has socially anxiety disorder or even a worse disorder sure they might have it worse.
But the average woman probably has an easier time making friends an easier time getting a job than me (my social anxiety has screwed up a lot of interviews too). An easier time just talking to people in general. Like my anxiety is so bad that I get extremley nervous before I even call someone on the phone who I don’t know. There’s a ton of examples I can give.
But as I said i’m really not trying to argue here I know you guys get a lot of trolls and people coming here to argue but i’m just civilly saying how I feel.
“Hellkell has a good point that if you wanted to know you can find out so much more info by doing your own research instead of asking random people on the internet.”
Well I like the social interaction. I don’t get a lot of it in real life so what can I say lol.
Couldn’t it be that you are a bit obsessed with ‘privilege’? It’s nearly has something of a substitute religion to me.
But the average woman probably has an easier time making friends an easier time getting a job than me (my social anxiety has screwed up a lot of interviews too). An easier time just talking to people in general. Like my anxiety is so bad that I get extremley nervous before I even call someone on the phone who I don’t know. There’s a ton of examples I can give.
This is where,and why, most people who have problems with the idea of privilege get stuck.
None of us is, “average”, and it doesn’t matter.
Privilege isn’t about you, qua you. It’s about the class you belong too, and all the things you don’t see.
Privilege is water, and you are the fish. If you are male, then you have that going for you. You are more likely to get a second chance, no matter what your handicaps are; than a woman with the same sorts of handicaps.
If you are white, you have that too.
Etc.
It’s not that you get specifically special treatment. It’s not that your life is easy. It’s that for someone who is equal, in all other respects, the privileged aspects weigh in your favor, relative to them.
Even that doesn’t mean you will come out, “on top” when it’s you and someone who has less privilege, it just means the odds are slightly in your favor.
Hey Chris, actually what you’re talking about there with “but a woman might be privileged over me if she doesn’t have social anxiety” is true. In that regard. People without difficulties are privileged over people who have those difficulties. That is true across the board–regardless of your gender or sex. Thing is, there is not a specific pecking order or hierarchy of oppression. You are not “less privileged” than a woman without a social anxiety disorder just because your social anxiety disorder puts you at a disadvantage. It’s not a question of quantity. Society privileges maleness in a great many of its strata, so you will benefit from that. It does not mean you therefore will have it easier than every woman, and it also does not mean that your social anxiety can’t intersect with that in negative ways. Just like a black man has privilege for being a man and experiences oppression for being black, you have privilege for being male and you have prejudice against you for the disorder you have. It’s not a problem of being in either a “privileged” category or NOT. As a person who benefits from being white, able-bodied, and upper middle class in my society, I am also discriminated against for being female, non-Christian, and not straight. It’s not an all or nothing deal, and sometimes these things interact in unpredictable and unfair ways. I hope it makes sense to you that no one’s saying women without social anxiety problems are all still more oppressed than you are. There isn’t a unit of measurement to quantify oppression.
And here we go with the “I’m more oppressed than women.” Didn’t take long at all.
Annnd here we go with the oppression olympics. You called it, Jumbo.
jinx XD
The biggest privilege is still to be born at the “right” longitude and latitude, nearly everything else pales in comparison to that. That wins the oppression olympics.
fuck off vindicare you have no idea what you are talking about
Chris, the online interaction would probably go a lot better here if it looked like you had at least tried to educate yourself about what privilege (in all of its layers) means, instead of using this as a forum to ask really basic questions. In any case, people have given you some good information, so you might want to think about it for a while before posting again on the subject.
Okay even if you are not phrasing it passively its pretty clear you think you are more oppressed than women due to your social anxiety. That my friends is oppression olympics and a denial of reality just because you can’t picture it. Your suffering doesn’t need to be ignored but its not the worst thing in the world and magically is more oppressive than misogyny. You also don’t seem to take misogyny seriously at all implying its not a big deal which hilariously is a good display of your own privileged. You have the privileged of not knowing or having to deal with misogyny so you don’t care. You yourself said most people don’t understand social anxiety and how hard it really is and then you go off and minimize misogyny.
I’ve seen DKM quite “civilly” explain that all women should be sex slaves. The tone doesn’t make much of a difference if you are spouting out misogynist things.
*privilege
(for some reason I keep adding a “d” to the end out of privilege naturally even if I didn’t mean to say that O_o)
Jumbo, I’m pretty sure he was here to minimize misogyny from the get-go. That seems to be his MO, ask simple questions and then flip it back to women and how they can’t possibly have it worse than him.
One time “introvert” was a vocab word in high school and (being familiar with Myers-Briggs) I gave as an example sentence “I am an introvert.” I was surprised when my friends all said “No, you’re not!” as if I’d just insulted myself.
Why should I use your notion of privilege? I use it as it’s understood in the English language, not on some “Geek Feminism Wiki”.
Isn’t it an interesting observation that in all that theorizing it’s always about “society building” and never about the actual humans?
Vindicare: unh.. no.
Because that is one of the ways in which the english language uses privilege. If you peruse, rather than merely reference, dictionaries this becomes plain.
Since the context was given, your obstreperous use of, “real humans” is much of a muchness; in that you are being intentionally obtuse.. In all theorising, from Plato, to Aristotle, to Aquinas to Kant to the present, the subject is abstract.
If it weren’t it wouldn’t be theory, it would be case study.
So Vindicare, in the English language the word “privilege” means some kind of a sport that you can win? As a fluent English speaker I would have to disagree. Maybe you’re thinking of some other language. Trollish, possibly.
Chris seems to be our substitute for MRAL (who’s still pestering me on Jezebel, and has now escalated to finding my profile on a dating site and commenting on the photos as part of his campaign to convince me I’m a privileged princess). It’s like there’s a Manboobz bylaw that we must have at least one young man complaining about how his issues with dating are awful and therefore women on average are better off than him at all times.
What name is the little toad using on Jezebel, Cassandra?
His obsession with you is getting seriously creepy.
@Vindicare
Have you checked in the dictionary under the word privileged? Or do trolls have different dictionaries with their different language and all.
@cassanadra
ugg what a creep he seriously needs to get a life.
Hey Chris,
Look, you’re not going to win any converts around here… it’s just going to be a negative experience. The community here has made up their minds re. misogyny or whatever, and don’t take too kindly to dissenters. They’re are kind of jerks to be honest; I learned that last month. They’re not interested in the problems of the socially anxious. Come on, haven’t seen you on Love-Shy in a while!
Privilege is the advantage of a group to the disadvantage of others. I think we agree on that. What I don’t agree to are that I should follow long instructions how I am not allowed to argue about privilege – most without good justification.
Just to mention “You are engaging in Oppression Olympics!” is seen like a convincing argument. But why? Because I want to prove that one group of oppressed people is “worthier”? Silence others? Deny the legitimacy of your oppression? What if that’s not my intention? Can you read my mind?
Honestly, who would doubt, that in some cases it’s pretty clear that it’s good to get your priorities straight? Why is that so evil?